Proust brings up many instances pertaining to our recollection of time that I can easily relate to. For instance, he talks about the concept of déjà vu, though he does not use that name to describe his thoughts. He brings up an instance where he trips on cobble stone and how that very action brings him back in time to being in Venice. Various sensations from Venice start to reoccur in his mind that attracts even more linked sensations. We as humans are all aware of this feeling. Any of our five senses have the ability to attract and replay memories and feelings about events that occurred in our past.
While Proust does bring up many relatable topics, he also has a way of taking familiar ideas and changing them into something very unfamiliar. He talks about the sensation of waking up from a deep sleep and being unaware of our surroundings. For a moment, we cannot remember where we are or how we got there. This is a very familiar idea to me; however, Proust then changes this familiar idea and makes it totally foreign by saying, “the memory—would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being…in a flash I would traverse centuries of civilization, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps… I would gradually piece together the original components of my ego”(5). I wish Proust would be more simplistic and concise in his explanations of his feelings, because it is rather hard to follow his thought process when he is going off on tangents about concepts that make no sense to me.